It’s only a short article with not much analysis or detail, but The Economist magazine seems to have embraced the commons. This is a stunning reversal for a publication that has long regarded Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” fable as gospel and sufficient reason to expand private property rights.

Yet there it was, in the September 12 issue:“The alternatives to privatization and nationalization,” the headline declared, proposing commons as a better way to manage wealth. This was followed by the heretical subheadline: “More public resources could be managed as commons without much loss of efficiency.”

Gobsmacked by this conclusion from a champion of market economics, I immediately pored through the unsigned article to see the reasoning behind the article. Alas, there was not the indepth analysis that I had hoped for. Still, it was encouraging to see The Economist reconsider the English enclosure movement. Instead of celebrating the Industrial Revolution as a necessary Great Leap Forward, the article questioned whether enclosures actually resulted in productivity gains, as frequently claimed by capitalist historians.

“Privatising shared resources, it turns out, does not always lead to a productivity boom,” writes the author, nor does it “always lead to a productivity boom.” Citing research by Robert Allen of NYU Abu Dhabi, the author notes that English lords did not necessarily reinvest their profits to improve productivity and spur innovation: “Most indulged in fine living; many were debtors rather than savers.”

I’m thrilled to say that Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons – the book I’ve been working on for the past three years with my long-time colleague Silke Helfrich – is published today. The book is our ambitious attempt to synthesize what we've learned from scores of commons around the world over the past twenty years.

The book is wide-ranging in its analysis of the power of commoning, but it focuses on the internal social and interpersonal dynamics of commoning; how the commons worldview opens up new possibilities for change; and the role of language in reorienting our perceptions and political strategies.

Next week I’m embarking on a tour in Europe and UK with Silke to engage a number of audiences with the themes of the book. You can check out our appearances on the right of this webpage, or on the Free, Fair and Alive website at www.freefairandalive.org.

Our book is a foundational reconceptualization of the commons as a living social system. Instead of regarding commons as resources, in the style of standard economics and Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” essay, we show that commons are in fact dynamic, living social processes. (That’s why economists can’t see them!) They rely on a whole set of human values and behaviors that the standard economic narrative regards as marginal. Our book is a rare inquiry into commoning – the verb, the social practices, the moral relationships – which is quite different from the commons -- the noun, as resources and their exchange value.

The further Silke and I got into studying and rethinking the commons as a concept, the more that we realized that prevailing categories of thought are simply too reductionist to capture what is really going on within commons. For example, standard economics, property law, and policy assume the reality of rational, autonomous individuals, as reflected in the idea of homo economicus, the philosophy of modern liberalism, and the presumed separation of humanity and “nature.”

The Great Transition Initiative recently hosted one of the most thoughtful, robust exchange of ideas about “localism” that I’ve seen in a long time. It was kicked off by an essay by environmental activist and author Brian Tokar called “Think Globally, Act Locally?” which explored “the promise and pitfalls of localism, theories of ‘glocalism’ and scaling sideways and up.”

What followed were some probing responses by fourteen notable activists and academics
who have thought long and hard about this topic – folks like Richard Heinberg, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Gwendolyn Hallsmith, Meg Holden, Frank Fischer, Arturo Escobar, and me, among others. Tokar gives a final round of responses to all of these commenters.

Tokar’s opening essay calls attention to the resurgence of progressive action at the local level and asks: “What are the prospects for such locally centered political engagement in a time of rising political polarization and conflict? How can local action help advance personal liberation and social justice? More broadly, how can it further our goals for global transformation?”

His review of the current state of localism is masterfully succinct yet broad-ranging. He rightly cites the great influence of Murray Bookchin and social ecology on the thinking of local activism from Kurdish militants in Syria and Turkey to North Americans and Europeans. Today there is a growing mosaic of local initiatives that is starting to take note of each other's efforts. There is community-based resistance to fracking in dozens of places, rural French workers revolting against regressive tax policies, climate action in hundreds of cities, a “municipalist” movement that is flourishing in cities like Barcelona and Jackson, Mississippi, and the expansion of the Symbiosis research network that is focused on localism.

While there are many ways that academics now study commoning, few show the broad-minded enthusiasm, scholarly engagement, and political awareness that I encountered at the Sharing Society’s international conference in Bilbao, Spain.

The May 23-24 event brought together a wide variety of international scholars, practitioners and activists who care about cooperation in its many permutations – commons, open source software, care work, citizen-science, makerspaces, urban collaborations, and many other forms.

There was no privileged discourse or correct point of view at this conference – just a fantastic mix of explorers trying to understand “the characteristics, trajectory and impact of collaborative collective actions.” The focus was on social phenomena in Europe and North America, especially as affected by today’s political economy, but the event ventured into such unexpected zones as refugee resettlement, the circular economy in fashion, and participatory governance in a Cairo neighborhood. Wow!

The Sharing Society project has an impressive research team drawing from six Spanish universities and eight foreign academics institutions (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Turkey, and the UK). Directed by sociology professor Benjamín Tejerina, a scholar of collective identity, the project is based at the University of the Basque Country and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (!).

Modern capitalism has the conceit that only individual property owners create wealth and they therefore deserve all the rewards.It cannot comprehend the idea that commoners and commons create value. Fortunately, a brilliant young cartoonist from Canberra, Australia, Stuart McMillen, clearly explains the collective origins of wealth through a wonderful extended comic strip. It is a parable involving collective moral claims on a World Series baseball that, by extension, exposes the self-delusions of people who believe they are "self-made."

I just learned that the comic is based on a blog post that I produced with my friend, the late Jonathan Rowe, in 2010 -- “The Missing Sector: Enlarging Our Sense of ‘the Economy’” – in which we reflected on a controversy that arose after the 2004 World Series. After making the final 'out' in the last game of the series, a player for the Boston Red Sox quietly kept the baseball, knowing that he could sell it for millions of dollars and profit personally. The team’s victory was historic and sweet because it was the Red Sox’s first World Series victory in 85 years. But that sense of elation curdled when it was learned that first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz had pocketed the game-winning ball and refused to surrender it.

This story prompted Jon and I to reflect on the basic question, Who creates wealth? Who exactly created the monetary value of that ordinary ball, and why should the person who just happened to be holding it at the end of the game be entitled to all its value?

The privileges of land ownership are so huge and far-reaching that they are generally taken as immutable facts of life – something that politics cannot possibly address. A hearty salute is therefore in order for a fantastic new report edited by George Monbiot, the brilliant columnist for The Guardian, and a team of six experts. The report, “Land for the Many: Changing the Way our Fundamental Asset is Used, Owned and Governed,” lays out a rigorous, comprehensive plan for democratizing access and use of land.

“Dig deep enough into many of the problems this country faces, and you will soon hit land,” writes Monbiot. “Soaring inequality and exclusion; the massive cost of renting or buying a decent home; repeated financial crises, sparked by housing asset bubbles; the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems; the lack of public amenities – the way land is owned and controlled underlies them all. Yet it scarcely features in political discussions.” (The six report coauthors are Robin Grey, Tom Kenny, Laurie Macfarlane, Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole and Beth Stratford.).

The report contains recommendations to the British Labour Party as it develops a policy agenda in preparation for the next general election. Given that much of the world suffers from treating land as a speculative asset, the report could be considered a template for pursuing similar reforms around the world. (Monbiot’s column summarizing the report can be found here.)

I am always amazed at how commoning reaches into the most unlikely realms of life. The latest example that I’ve discovered is jazz performance! For the moment, leave aside the idea of jazz as an artform that is fundamentally about commoning – improvised collaboration, individual artistry that flowers within an ensemble, being attuned to the present moment.

Let’s just consider concert production as a commons.

In western Massachuetts, where I live, Pioneer Valley Jazz Sharesrepresents a creative mashup of the CSA farm model (community-supported agriculture) with concert production. Instead of paying upfront for a season’s supply of vegetables, people pay for a September-June season of ten jazz concerts. It’s like a subscription model but it’s more of a community investment in supporting a jazz ecosystem. Talented musicians get to perform, fans get to experience some cutting-edge jazz, the prices are entirely reasonable for everyone, and a community spirit flourishes.

As the group explains:

Our members purchase jazz shares to provide the capital needed to produce concerts with minimal institutional support. A grassroots, all-volunteer organization, we are a community of music lovers in Western Massachusetts dedicated to the continued vitality of jazz music. By pooling resources, energy and know-how, members create an infrastructure that is able to bring world-class improvisers to our region.

Cofounders Glenn Siegel and Priscilla Page decided to launch Jazz Shares after realizing that there were many more jazz musicians in the region than there were commercial venues to support them. As a longtime concert producer at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Siegel lamented, “Each season I would receive many more worthy gig requests than I could honor. With a limit on how many University concerts I could produce each year (six), and without the personal resources to just write checks, I got tired of saying ‘Sorry, no’ to some of my musical heroes. I knew there must be another way to bring these great musicians to town.”

As an economist might put it, there was a market failure (demand did not induce an adequate supply). So commoning came to the rescue!

This Friday marks a special date for me – the release of the German version of my new book with Silke Helfrich -- Frei, Fair und Lebendig: Die Macht der Commons -- published by transcript Verlag. The English version -- Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons – will be published in September by New Society Publishers.

On April 12, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, which sponsored the writing of our book, will be hosting a public event to launch the book. Silke will be there, of course, and after speaking she will have a conversation with the prominent German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa; Robert Habeck, the Federal Chairman of Alliance ’90/The Greens; and Elisabeth von Thadden, editor of DIE ZEIT.

We have been working on this book for much of the past three years, so I am thrilled by its completion (from which I am still recovering). Let me hoist a transatlantic toast to my dear friend for her brilliant ideas, warm collegiality, and sheer persistence throughout this odyssey.

Silke Helfrich, celebrating the launch of Frei, Fair und Lebendig.

I will offer a longer introduction to the book as the release of the English edition draws closer. For now, let me just say that our book is an ambitious attempt to build on Elinor Ostrom’s work by providing a deeper understanding of the commons as a living social organism. Our new framework – the Triad of Commoning -- focuses on the commons in three interrelated aspects – the social, the political (peer governance), and the economic (provisioning). We also look at how one’s view of elemental reality shapes one’s sense of political possibility, and how language plays a critical role in making commoning visible.

This approach emerged after months of working on our book. Silke and I concluded that we just couldn’t convey the realities of commoning if we remained captive to the rational-actor, resource-focused framework used by so many economists. Much of that language points us in the wrong direction by downplaying or ignoring the social, personal, and ecological relationships that live at the heart of a commons.

In a variation on my last post, on the commons in South East Europe, it seems apt to mention another regional history of the commons, in Italy. This history was written by Ugo Mattei in 2014 as a chapter in a book, Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century, edited by Peter Weibel (and published by ZKM/Center for Art Media Karlsruhe, in Germany, and MIT Press in the US).

Mattei is the noted international law scholar, lawyer and activist who has been at the center of some of the most significant commons initiatives in Italy. His chapter is a welcome synthesis of how the commons discourse in Italy arose from the misty-eyed imagination of a few far-sighted legal commoners, to become a rally cry in critical fights against the privatization of water, the Teatro Valley theater in Rome, and other cherished shared wealth. The concept of the commons has since gone mainstream in Italian political culture, animating new initiatives and providing an indispensable vocabulary for fighting neoliberal capitalist policies.

Ugo’s piece is called “Institutionalizing the Commons: An Italian Primer.” (PDF file) In it, he describes the history of the commons in Italy as “a unique experiment in transforming indignation into new institutions of the commons,” adding, “perhaps this praxis ‘Italian style’ could become an example for a global strategy.”

The book, published in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and its office in Sarajevo, is a rigorous yet accessible 170-page introduction to the commons, with an accent on developments in the region of South East Europe (SEE). Its main editor and author is Tomislav Tomašević, with additional editing by Vedran Horvat and Jelena Milos, augmented by contributions from a number of individual authors and a larger team.

The Rojc Community Centre in the City of Pula.

The Institute’s primary goal in preparing the book is to “put this part of Europe….on the landscape of international academic and political debate on the commons.” By synthesizing knowledge about the commons in the region, the book aims to “provide an interpretive and theoretical framework” for understanding “numerous political actions and mobilizations that have emerged across the region of South East Europe, mainly with the ambition of creating the commons or defending and resisting further enclosure of the commons. Since practice has preceded in-depth theoretical understanding in many cases, we felt a responsibility to start bridging this gap.”

I highly recommend the book. It’s a tight, well-written, and carefully documented overview of a region whose commons have not received enough attention.

The book starts with a “compact history of the commons” featuring the classical theory of the commons and newer “critical theory.” From these chapters, the book introduces the history of the commons in the region, cases of commons governance there, and significant political struggles against enclosure.